The Handsome Monk and Other Stories

This is an interesting mix of stories in a unusual style (vs Western writing). An excellent introduction provides helpful context and previews that really made a difference by setting me up well for a good read. These are mostly simple stories with Ralo being the highlight since it's the longest story and the best known (to the extent that it's known). Some of the stories are funny. A good, different kind of book.

I definitely won't recommend this one to our library patrons. The writing it bad and the stories are not funny. Just disappointing all around.

The Handsome Monk and Other Stories fell flat for me. I am not sure if it was just lost in translation or just not for me.

One pretty good reason to read <i>The Handsome Monk and Other Stories</i> by Tsering Döndrub right off the bat is simply because it’s a work originally written in Tibetan and translated into English. If you want an idea of how rare that is, try doing a Google search for the author. There is a Wikipedia stub, but it’s in French. The best biographical information I could find is from <a href=http://www.latse.org/publications/latse-library-newsletter-vol-6>volume six of the Latse Library Newsletter</a> published by the <a href=http://www.trace.org>Trace Foundation</a>.

The book is a collection of short stories about Tibetans living in modern China. The stories range in style from the short folktalesque ‘The Disturbance in D—Camp’ that opens the collection to the hard-hitting, contemporary, first-person narrative ‘Notes of a Volunteer AIDS Worker’ that ends it. Here I’ll focus on my favourite, ‘Ralo’, which is also the longest of the stories.

‘Ralo’ is the story of an unfortunate boy with a mucus problem, as told from the perspective of a classmate who keeps encountering Ralo at different points over the years. This self-confessed unreliable narrator tells one whacky, bizarre, and amusing “biographical” story. It begins in a Tibetan camp and ranges through a boarding school, monastery, multiple marriages, prison, and a road trip with a reincarnated parent. It is many ways a picaresque story, although Ralo is no two-dimensional rogue. He goes all the way from sympathetic to outrageous and back again. Multiple times. It’s a wild ride.

There’s more, of course. Fascinating glimpses of a unique and (for me) unfamiliar culture, a muted critique of Chinese rule, the theme of religious corruption threading through multiple stories. But the real draw here are damn good stories, many of which I mulled over for days. This is a book I’ll be revisiting, and I very much hope that more of the author’s works—and Tibetan literature generally—will become available in English.

Stories with an easy-to-read, yarn-like quality. Linked by setting -- a fictional nomad county, based on the author's home in Amdo -- and by recurring cast, including a story-collector named Döndrup. From the introduction I feared black & bitter, but I found the satire left plenty of room for affection and more plaintive notes. My clear favourite was 'Black Fox Valley' with its storyline typical of Döndrup's themes (as the introduction pointed out): nomads' collision with modernity.

This collection of Tibetan short stories may be the first Tibetan book I have ever read. Dondrup is a well-known writer in Tibet. The introduction by the translator (Christopher Peacock) is excellent in laying out some historic/cultural groundwork, though I know I still missed things in the stories.

Dondrup is funny and witty. Scathing in some stories. The stories all focus on different aspects of life in modern Tibet--nomadic life, monks and lamas, marriage and children, and the ever-present fact of Chinese occupation is lurking in the background when not in the foreground. Nomads are hassled or at war with Chinese villagers who have been settled onto nomads' traditional lands, settled into towns, deal with cadres and other aspects of Chinese rule, AIDS. Many of the stories have crossover characters (I wish I had taken notes on the characters' names). Another character, Alak Drong, appears in many stories and is an unscrupulous monk, he is very important to Dondrup's criticisms of modern Tibetan Buddhism. And yes, there are even Western tourists who make an appearance.

My two favorite stories--both are excellent 5-star stories on their own-- are A Show to Delight the Masses (a corrupt official must justify his behavior to the Lord of Death; in verse and prose) and Black Fox Valley (about the settlement of nomads).